2008-2009 Dehn Foundation Visiting Artists Series

2008-2009

Jessica Stockholder was born in Seattle in 1959. She studied painting at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and received an MFA from Yale University. Stockholder is a pioneer of multimedia genre-bending installations that have become a prominent language in contemporary art. Her site-specific interventions and autonomous floor and wall pieces have been described as “paintings in space.” Stockholder’s complex installations incorporate the architecture in which they have been conceived, blanketing the floor, scaling walls and ceiling, and even spilling out of windows, through doors and into the surrounding landscape. Her work is energetic, cacophonous and idiosyncratic, but close observation reveals formal decisions about color and composition, and a tempering of chaos with control. In a single work, Stockholder deploys a myriad of materials that might include bales of hay, fruit, toys, laundry baskets, curtains, heat lamps, fans, yarn, newspaper, bowling balls, automobiles and construction materials. To the vibrantly colorful plastic products of consumer culture, she adds painted areas of bright hues, calibrating each color for maximum optical and spatial impact. Stockholder’s installations, sculptures and collages affirm the primacy of pleasure, the blunt reality of things and the rich heterogeneity of life, mind and art amid a vortex of shifting polarities – abstraction/realism, classical order/intuitive expressionism, conscious thought/unconscious desire. Jessica Stockholder is Director of Graduate Studies in Sculpture at Yale University. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including: Dia Center for the Arts, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City; SITE Santa Fe; the Venice Biennale; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Sandy Skoglund is an internationally recognized American installation artist whose work fuses her interests in photography, popular culture and commercialization. Sandy Skoglund was born in Quincy, MA, and attended Smith College where she studied studio art and art history from 1964 to 1968. She spent her junior year abroad in Paris studying art history at the Sorbonne and Ecole du Louvre. Skoglund went on to graduate school at the University of Iowa in 1969 where she concentrated on filmmaking, intaglio printmaking and multimedia art. She received her MA in 1971 and her MFA in painting in 1972. In 1972, Skoglund moved to New York where she started working as a conceptual artist, dealing with repetitive, process-oriented art production. In the late seventies, Skoglund’s desire to document conceptual ideas led her to teach herself photography. This developing interest in photographic technique became fused with her interest in popular culture and commercial picture making strategies, resulting in a series of food still-lives in 1978 with such titles as Luncheon Meat on a Counter and Peas on a Plate. Since 1981, when Revenge of the Goldfish and Radioactive Cats appeared at the Whitney Biennial Exhibition, Skoglund has achieved a leading position in revolutionary photography. Many of her installations have been commissioned by museums and universities around the world. In 1987, the photograph and installation of A Breeze at Work was commissioned by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN, to be premiered there as part of the exhibition Sculpture into Photography. The Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris commissioned Fox Games in 1989 for an exhibition entitled The Invention of an Art, a history of photography celebrating the 150th anniversary of the invention of the medium. The Wedding was commissioned by the Columbus Museum of Art in 1994. In 1997, Smith College commissioned Walking on Eggshells, an installation and photography to accompany the retrospective Reality Under Siege. This exhibit included a retrospective of early conceptual work, photographs and four installations. The book published in conjunction with the show, by Harry N. Abrams in 1998, includes essays by Robert Rosenblum, Carol Squiers, Linda Muehlig and Ann Sievers. Reality Under Siege has been on view at Smith College Museum of Art, Cincinnati Museum of Art, Columbia Museum of Art, The Toledo Museum of Art and Joslyn Art Museum. Some of Skoglund’s other commissions include the Shimmering Madness for Rutgers University in 1998, Breathing Glass for the American Craft Museum in 2000 and Raining Popcorn for the Faulconer Gallery at Grinnell College in 2001. Sandy Skoglund currently teaches at Rutgers University.

Dr. Nan Freeman was born in Houston. She is widely known for her dramatically large charcoal drawings of small-scale, intimate objects such as tiaras, jewelry, hair ornaments and silverware, which carry great social and cultural potency. She sustains an active record of exhibitions nationally and internationally, including recent one-person exhibitions in: The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Cheekwood Museum, Nashville; The Gibson House Museum, Boston; The Baer Art Centre, Hofsos, Iceland; Galerie Nev, Istanbul; and Galerie al Riwaq, Manama Bahrain. She has held numerous exhibitions of her work in collaboration with Feridun Ozgoren, including exhibitions at the Fitchburg Museum and the National Museum of Painting and Sculpture, Istanbul. Her works are in numerous public and private collections worldwide. Permanent public art projects include her Bridge of Hope mural at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She has received two grants from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, two Fulbright Fellowships, grants from the governments of Spain and Bahrain and the Massachusetts Council of the Arts and Humanities, as well as three Herbert Cushman Fund Faculty Grants from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Freeman earned her undergraduate degree at Smith College, her master’s at the University of Pennsylvania and her doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Department of Architecture. She has taught at Harvard University, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Wellesley College, Brandeis University, the University of Marmara in Istanbul and Bogazici University in Istanbul. Currently she is senior faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Nan Freeman writes and speaks frequently on her own work, on contemporary art and artists, and on topics in popular culture, most recently Blue Jeans; America’s National Pants (2007).